


Battle to the Death

by wcdarling



Category: Vampire Chronicles - All Media Types, Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Bombs, Gen, Trench Warfare, Vampires, War, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-16
Updated: 2016-06-16
Packaged: 2018-07-15 08:47:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7215652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wcdarling/pseuds/wcdarling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A vampire meets death head-on. Written back in 2001 for a Vampire Chronicles spec writing content with the theme of, you guessed it, Death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Battle to the Death

**Author's Note:**

> Although I wrote this story for a Vampire Chronicles challenge, it really has no connection to VC per se, meaning it could be about a vampire in some other universe, not necessarily just VC. There is nothing particularly Ricean about this vampire or situation. Still, I've filed it under VC because that's what I wrote it as.
> 
> -Wendy

On the back of his eyelids, he saw red. His every vein and artery screamed to be colored, drowned, filled with this red, this crimson, this shimmering darkness. His tongue ached with the need for it, arched up against the roof of his mouth.

In his dreams, he felt his fangs breaking through neck after neck to take in the taste, the warmth, the life within. Over and over, the red running down his throat but also out of the corners of his mouth, streaking down in rivulets. Taking and taking, as if he could never be sated. Taking this liquid that was existence itself.

_It was blood!_

The vampire was jolted into consciousness. Instinctively, he opened his eyes. The lids were withered away, dried so that they scraped across his eyeballs. His vision was failing but he was untroubled by this blindness; there was nothing to see. It was dark in this space, dark and cold.

He allowed his eyelids to slip down as his mind raced for explanations. Where was he this time? How long had he been there? And how long had he been lusting for this blood?

The answers came with great difficulty. The thirst pierced him like a spear. His heart lusted, his skin lusted, his brain, half turned to dust, so very dry, _lusted_. The questions barrelled through, a tornado ripping him apart, fragments flying this way and that, images and words slamming down and slipping away.

Finally, however, he _knew_. He was a vampire. He had buried himself some time ago, possibly a long time ago, although there was no way of knowing, not really, although the thirst told him that it must have been years ago. He struggled to move his hands and feel his surroundings. His fingers could barely move. Weak, so utterly weak he was, and underground in the dark. He would have to get out.

The scent of the blood was more than distracting; it was pure agony, a madness that gripped him like a raging brain fever. He tried to recover his memories and they came to him in vague, jumbled images, the half-formed thoughts of a dream. Surely he had been lying in the earth for a long time. After so many years of only blood dreams, his brain was hardly used to thinking.

The memories did yield a few salient facts. Before he had buried himself, he had been unhappy. Tired, he had been, so very tired, and he had wanted to rest. Wandering in the night, he had come to a village church and its churchyard. Perhaps the smell of death had drawn him there; he had discovered a fresh grave. Quickly the newly turned dirt had been cast aside, the body lifted and moved to the outside, just outside the coffin, and he had slipped inside. In a blur of motion, the dirt fell down around him, the coffin was closed, and he was in darkness.

That same night, a hard raid had fallen. No one would ever know the grave had been disturbed. Day after day it rained. Meanwhile the vampire had thirsted like he had not thirsted in years, decades, centuries. The corpse lying outside the coffin had rotted and the reek of it penetrated his senses even as he had slipped further and further into the dreams, away from the life of undeath he had led above.

Returning to the moment, his thoughts sank once again into the blood, the thought of it, and above all the smell of it. It was so strong! Had there been a large funeral? Some sort of massacre? Or was it only that a mortal had died, perhaps been stabbed, just above him among the headstones?

He had to find out, but of course there was the question of how. How could he possibly rescue himself from this self-made grave? He should just give up and let himself fall back into the dreams again, dry up into nothing until the day when some mortal would disturb the ground and discover him. If discovery came during the day, it would his end; if it came during the night, it would be the mortal's end.

Just as the vampire was struggling with this thought, he felt a tremor in the earth and in his ears there came a loud sound. The earth shook in time with the sound. It wasn't thunder, but it was a violent sound, like something hitting the earth. The vampire was paralyzed with fear as well as another emotion: pain.

He felt a surge of pain but it wasn't his own pain. It was the people around him, the mortals above. He had been unconsciously blocking them, but in that moment of shock, as the tremors hit, he had lowered his shields and the pain and broken through.

He closed his mind tight once more. All thoughts of giving up had disappeared. He had to rise. He had to know what was going on and he had to have the blood. The smell had grown stronger and in the brief moment he had let down his guard, he had known that mortals were suffering, bleeding rivers of blood, just above him, or at least quite close nearby.

Suddenly it seemed it knew exactly what to do. His mind was not involved. No, this was something that came from somewhere he could not reach by thinking. His arms shot out and his withered hands connected with the wooden sides of the coffin. They were rotten. It had been decades, perhaps centuries, and the wooden box had gone to pieces. From somewhere inside himself, there came a will to survive, and that will drove him to get out of the ground.

Blood all around him, but not only human. No, there were animals as well, rodents, slithering creatures he would rather not see, things that lived in the darkness. His hands took these and brought them to his lips. As a vampire, he did not need to breathe, strictly speaking, but he felt himself suffocating under the earth nonetheless. The feel of flesh against his lips, of warm blood, drove him mad. Animal blood would not do. Not when there was so much human blood to be had above.

The earth was wracked by spasms. More sounds. This time the vampire heard screams. His back arched in pain until finally it was decided. He wrenched himself up and he made for the surface. The soil was so heavy and the animals had granted him only a little strength, but the power came from inside himself and slowly he rose up towards the surface, leaving the coffin behind.

His hands, shrunk into claws, jabbed into the open air, and awkwardly, painfully, the vampire extricated himself from the cemetery earth. What he saw, what he smelled, what he _felt_ made him want to sink down to the coffin.

The air should have been red, it was so thick with blood, and it was no mystery where the blood was coming from. The ground was littered with bodies. Men were broken, bleeding, face-down, twisted above, broken in pieces, strewn out like dolls, staggering through the smoky air. Flashes of light came in time with the shuddering, the loud noises, like the cracking of thunder only the sound as it must be up in the heavens, that loud, that clear.

It the flash of light, the old stone church stood against the dull black of night. It was just the same as he had remembered it. There were no clouds but neither were there stars. The smoke spread out like fog.

Not five feet from where he had pitched on the broken earth, there lay a man ready and waiting for him. He would not live. Something had happened to him. There was blood coming out of his chest, blood at his knees, blood oozing out of his mouth. He could not speak and his eyes had rolled back into his head. Death would come soon -- sooner if the vampire came first.

The vampire moved forward before he could think. He latched onto the neck and took that which he required, craved, what his entire body and soul pleaded for. It was hot and it was alive and it was his. He drank it down in great gulps and only a few moments later, it was done. The man had lost much blood and there had not been much to take. Time to move on.

The vampire felt stronger. He began to think more clearly. He scanned the area. It was a war. Some type of war anyway. The blood was coming from men in uniforms. As he had taken that first mortal victim, he had read his thoughts, seen his mind. The man had thought in a language the vampire had understood, even if it did sound slightly different than what he was used to. Yes, this was a war.

Another man lay only a few yards away. Again, there was not much to take, but what there was, he took. He felt stronger. His mind was becoming more powerful. He opened it.

Hundreds of mortal voices flooded his mind. This power of his -- how had it grown so strong? The voices were so loud, so many! The war, the pain, the thoughts of the dying, screams of the dying, terror, despair -- all of this rushed in at once, a babble of inky black suffering. The vampire closed his mind. He could not bear it.

He stood and allowed his strengthening eyes to search out the details of his surroundings. He was at the outskirts of a village, in the cemetery. There was the road he had walked down the night he had given up on his life of darkness. Now the road was marked with bodies.

Everywhere there were bodies. So many soldiers dead. But where was the enemy? What kind of war was this?

In the distance he saw the bright flares of light. More bodies that way and probably something that would help him understand. He moved forward, down the road, towards the night. He found another victim and he paused to kill him. Growing in strength, he marched onward. He took another, then another, and then yet another. They were dying anyway; he might as well take what would be given up anyway. His flesh was filling out. His hands no longer looked like talons.

As the vampire walked, he thought about the war. He noticed the uniforms of the men. He had never seen anything like these uniforms. And the weapons! Baffling to him, these, so different than anything had seen, so different he barely knew they were weapons. There was no blade. When had he last seen weapons? He couldn't think of those those years before, not now. No, but he new it had been a long time. Things had changed.

The light grew brighter and now there was pain in his ears. What was this? For a moment, fraction of an insane moment, the vampire was afraid it was the sun, grown angry and come to earth. It wasn't. It was something else, something possibly worse, something loud, metal ripping apart, mortal bodies ripping apart.

The soldiers here were different. Not so many of them were dying. They were doing their jobs, fighting the fight, holding onto their guns. They stayed at his as he walked. He didn't have any clothes. He didn't care. He walked on towards the light, the sound, that which terrified him and drew him in.

He opened his mind to the voices. What was this light, he asked? What was the sound? The collective brain heaved up an answer. Bombs. Bomb after bomb. Like fireworks only not so harmless. The enemy was bombing. What was a bomb? Explosions. Fire. Buildings being destroyed. People blown to bits. People meeting death through the strange bladeless weapons, bleeding from where they had been pierced with pieces of metal.

The vampire clamped shut his mind, uncomprehending. What sort of a war was thing, when it was not men who were doing the kill, but bombs that cut swaths through like a scythe through the wheat? This war of fire and power, this concentrated thunder, lightning bent on killing, bowing down to the power of man. His mind screamed with questions.

Finally he stood as close to the fire as he could. Men were rushing all around him, screaming, bellowing, telling him to run, but he didn't run.

A sudden impact and then it was over, a great explosion, and the light and the fire and the end was everything. He was nothing. His legs fell away, his arms fell away, his body feel away, his head fell away, and he felt himself burning. So quickly, it was, like going into the sun, so quick, so painful.

Death like this, he never expected. Death had come to wake him, had knocked on the lid of his coffin, had beckoned him up to the surface, had called to him over the miles. Death took him.


End file.
